The Plight of King Leopold
by ALEXANDER WILLIAMS
1
FEW kings in modern times have started their reigns under more favorable auspices than Leopold III, King of the Belgians. Son of a popular and heroic father, husband of the charming and gracious Queen Astrid, and a personable figure of a man himself, Leopold began his career with what would seem like every advantage working for him. His first bad break occurred with the tragic death of Astrid in an automobile accident while he was driving. But the events which have led him into exile in Switzerland can be ascribed not so much to bad luck, or even to guessing the future wrong, as to faults within himself. And these events, regardless of the possibility of his recall as a result of the recent elections, will assuredly cause him to go down in history as Belgium’s sorriest monarch.
It is now established that he and his family were not carried off to Germany, before the Allied invasion of Europe, without his consent. Had he been liberated along with his country, he would have had to face the music as soon as the legitimate government returned. But whether he himself elected to postpone the showdown or whether the whim of the Germans did it for him does not much matter. In any event he and his family were liberated early in May, 1945, by American troops in Austria, near Salzburg.
It will always be debated in Belgium whether Leopold would have succeeded in regaining his throne if he had returned at once, braved the inevitable storm, and confronted the people with a defense of his conduct during the war. True, his return at that juncture might have upset the government and retarded the recovery of the country. As the Belgians were just then emerging from the trials of a particularly cruel winter, the disturbance created by his return would not have added to his popularity. But a hit of firmness might have won the game for him if he had acted swiftly before public opinion had a chance to form itself into blocs for and against him.
There had been a general, unwritten agreement in the Belgian press not to discuss the problem of the King until he was safe and had a chance to state his case. This was broken only once, to the best of my recollection. The corpulent and amiable burgomaster of Brussels, M. Van de Meulebroeck, went to London for a Lord Mayor’s ceremony and took the opportunity to make some flattering allusions to Leopold III. For this he was roundly called down by the Communist paper, Le Drapeau Rouge, which said caustically that among the many things the people desired when peace should come, the return of Leopold to his throne was not high on the list. Once again the press relapsed into silence, until the liberation of Leopold by the Americans released a tempest of argument.
There never was any question of the monarchy’s survival in Belgium. In principle, the Communists would doubtless have preferred a different form of government, but even they did not urge this among the many protests and plans they were in the habit of making. The great majority of Belgians firmly believe that the monarchy is the binding force in the country to hold the Flemish and Walloon elements of the population together. There is, to be sure, a vociferous group of Walloon separatists who have wanted the French-speaking part of the country tied politically and economically to France. But the present desperate and unhappy state of that nation does not give much support to their cause.
Like Holland, Belgium is satisfied with a constitutional monarchy. If Leopold III is not fit to reign, then his son Baudouin could succeed, and operate under the regency of Leopold’s brother, Prince Charles, until his coming of age. This solution, if Leopold had agreed to abdicate, would have satisfied everybody except the extreme right wing of the Catholic Party and the collaborationist elements, who might hope for softer treatment under Leopold.
Leopold’s actions, after his decision not to return immediately, took on a considerable air of mystery, not to say comic opera. On May 12 he sent the following letter to the Regent: —
MY DEAR BROTHER: —
As a result of the captivity which I have endured, my state of health does not permit me to return immediately to Belgium. I infinitely regret not having been able, since the liberation, to be with my people. During my captivity all my thoughts have been with them. I beg you to have the goodness, until my reestablishment, to continue the mission which you assumed in the interests of the nation.
Your affectionate brother,
LEOPOLD
This seemingly innocent missive amused the man in the street not a little. Your ordinary Belgian is a pretty shrewd fellow. After all, he has twice in a generation had to spend a large part of his time in trying to double-cross the Germans. So he did not really believe that the King was too sick to come home. He also suspected that the hand of Elizabeth, the unpopular German-born Queen Mother, would reveal itself. The personal relations between Prince Charles and the King have always been good, but it is noteworthy that the Queen Mother had always arranged it that Charles was invariably kept out of any functions which would have placed him in the limelight and thus might have created a focus for opposition against his brother.
Meanwhile, for nearly a year, Prince Charles had been very much in the public eye as Regent, a job he did not want but in which he acquitted himself with tact and conspicuous success. The functions of state bore him, and he would like nothing so much as to regain his personal liberty. Yet he has played his by no means easy role with consideration both for his brother’s position and for the welfare of the country. In this task he has had little but annoyance from the King and the King’s supporters, and not much help from his mother. Presumably he could be bitter about the treatment accorded him, for he was the only adult member of the Belgian royal family whose attitude during the occupation was completely above suspicion. Certainly all the others were far too careful to keep clear of being identified with the Resistance.
2
POPULAR suspicion that Leopold’s illness was less a real condition than a political maneuver to gain time received a distinct fillip from the somewhat tactless statement of an American officer, General Wade Haislip. The Associated Press reported the General as saying that King Leopold was in perfect health and that there was nothing to prevent his return to Belgium. “I dined with him myself two days ago,” said the General, “and I could then say that his state of health left nothing to be desired.”
The Belgian press printed this story with glee, under a picture of the King in uniform in the company of his pretty wife, the Princesse de Réthy. But the government hastened to deny this frank report and issued a bulletin stating that the King was suffering from cardiac trouble necessitating the attention of an American Army doctor, and that it was impossible for him to return. The people formed their own opinion. In the political game King Leopold had elected to play, he had lost the first move.
There then began that series of official journeys to and from Salzburg which ended in disgusting the people with the whole business. To an outsider it all looked very much like opéra bouffe. The Regent, the Queen Mother, members of the King’s household, the Prime Minister, members of the Cabinet, and various Parliamentary delegations shuttled back and forth, while in Belgium the public had little more than rumors to feed their curiosity. Some of these were amusing. For example, at one point-in the negotiations it was said in Brussels cafés that Leopold would abdicate all right, but that he was holding out for such high wages that the government was forced to delay and to bargain. It was also noted that every afternoon the King seemed on the point of agreeing to abdicate, but that he would then return to his handsome young wife and on the morrow was again firm in his resolution to retain his throne.
A word had better be said about this lady, whether or not she played a part in the King’s obstinacy, for she is certainly one of the reasons for his unpopularity. The Princesse de Réthy was a Mlle. Liliane Baels, the daughter of the Governor of West Flanders, who was suspected of being too friendly with the Germans, who was removed from his post by the King in 1940, and whose dossier was spirited away from the Ministry in charge of it by the connivance of this royal consort. Mile. Baels’s brother was said to have done propaganda against the legitimate Belgian government in Spain and Portugal throughout the occupation.
Queen Astrid had been very popular; so any new wife would be looked upon with a highly critical eye. Yet Leopold, who had become deeply religious after Astrid’s death, to the extent of contemplating retirement to a monastery, abruptly married this girl from a suspect family and created her Princesse de Réthy, the name which everyone knew he and Astrid had always used when traveling incognito. The people did not object so much to the fact that she was a commoner as to her suspicious background. The belief was widespread that she was an intrigante who had trapped the King into marriage, Leopold met Liliane Baels playing golf and asked her for a game at the Palace course. It is generally believed in Belgium that she played on his religious scruples by pleading that their child must be legitimatized.
Certainly the public was astounded to learn by an announcement in the churches on December 6, 1941, that the Cardinal had married the King and Mlle. Baels during the preceding September, an action which not only gave rise to rumors but also in itself involved a host of petty illegalities. The Prince Regent’s nickname for Leopold is said to be “Catastrophe,” in recognition of the fact that nothing the King has done since Astrid’s death has turned out well. On this occasion Prince Charles’s comment is supposed to have been: “Have you heard the latest on ‘Catastrophe’? He’s got himself married.”
Worse still, the King had announced as his reason for remaining in Belgium that he was the head of the Army and would be “the first prisoner among you.” This was all very fine, but everyone knows that prisoners are not permitted to marry lovely girls during their incarceration. That the King of the Belgians should do so while his subjects were suffering under the hated Germans hardly seemed in the best of taste.
At first the comings and goings between Brussels and Salzburg were followed with deep interest. The papers reported everything connected therewith, to the extent that their very restricted size allowed. The political parties lined up for and against abdication. The Liberals, Socialists, Communists, and a new party, the Union Démocratique Belge, came out for abdication. The extreme right-wing Catholics were pro-Leopold. This sharp division leaves ordinary Catholics faced with the dilemma of supporting a figure who, if he returns, will be King of the Catholics only, and not of the Belgian people as a whole.
To an outsider this struggle looks like the familiar one between Church and people; but, although the Church naturally supports the Catholic Party, and its leading prelates are pro-Leopold, it would be a mistake to say that the party is unanimously for the return of the King. Another pro-Leopold faction whose attitude disturbs the wisest statesmen among the Catholics is the collaborationists. There were Some 300,000 inciviques in Belgium with the return of voluntary workers from Germany after the war, the prisoners shut up or awaiting trial for collaboration, and the relics of the two Flemish and Walloon fascist parties. These undesirables have concluded that they stand to lose nothing, and have the possibility of a good deal to gain, by the restoration of Leopold to power.
The Catholic Party is anxious not to lose the power which it has enjoyed in Belgium for more than half a century. It lost its share in the coalition government over this question of King Leopold when the Socialist Prime Minister, M. Achille Van Acker, brought it to a debate in the Chamber of Deputies. The King had found himself unable to form a government; and since he would not abdicate, there remained no other course than to debate the subject in the open. In mid-July, therefore, the Catholic extremists forced the more liberal Catholics in the Cabinet to resign; whereupon the extremists lost control in the Chamber, and Van Acker won a vote of confidence.
3
I HAVE mentioned so far only one reason for Leopold’s unpopularity the story of his unfortunate second marriage. But this is far from the whole truth, and it is only fair to the Belgian people to say that more serious reasons were given prominence in the public discussions. Chief among these is the suspicion that, if not pro-German, he was at least fatalistic in his belief that the Germans had won and had come to stay as the power in Europe. This view was due possibly to his own inclination. His pride led him to trust his flattering pro-German advisers and his Germanborn mother, rather than to give ear to more farsighted and patriotic counselors. At one point he went to Berchtesgaden to talk with Hitler, an action that has been variously explained, though never fully by the King himself; so it looked to many people as if he meant to tie Belgium to the “new order.”
The Socialist paper, Le Peuple, stated without mincing words that in 1940 “Leopold III led us unwittingly — even though now he protests that his conscience is clean — to the threshold of treason.” The royal military adviser, General Van Overstraeten, was certainly convinced that the Germans were going to win and was mightily impressed by their war machine. He even permitted himself to be photographed with Princesse Marie José, Leopold’s sister, and a couple of German officers, being shown over the fort of Eben Emael, which the Germans had so successfully surprised and circumvented in their drive in 1940. A Belgian friend of mine, who is far from being a radical, keeps that photograph on his mantelpiece to remind him of how Belgians close to the King could dare to commit so outrageously unpatriotic an act.
Further, it is held against Leopold that he never lifted a finger to aid the Resistance or to manifest enthusiasm for the Allied cause. He insisted, of course, that he was a prisoner and must keep himself isolated from all politics; but many people felt that he could all the same have done as much as did the similarly situated King of Denmark. He is also properly blamed for not having followed his government into exile as did his neighbors, the Queen of the Netherlands and the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg.
Leopold maintained that, as head of the Army, it was his duty to stay with his troops, but we have seen that he could turn around and regard his role as “first prisoner” in a singular fashion. Moreover, by the Belgian Constitution, the King is obliged to obey his Ministers. And his Ministers specifically advised him to follow them and form a free government in London. In not complying, he committed an arbitrary and unconstitutional act.
Meanwhile, as the country discussed, the papers began to publish odd and unsavory bits of evidence: a letter from the King’s secretary to a notorious journalistic collaborator; a telegram from Hitler thanking the King of the Belgians for his congratulations on the Führer’s birthday. The highly conservative paper and chief protagonist for Leopold, La Libre Belgique. argued that the telegram was a typical German dodge in response to a nonexistent message and that Count Capelle, the King’s secretary, had written the letter without his master’s knowledge. It was hinted that these items were part of a radical plot to overthrow the monarchy itself. Actually the items were printed by the eminently respectable and ordinarily politically unbiased paper, Le Soir. If these revelations did not do the King’s case as much harm as everyone thought at the time, they certainly did not do it much good.
From his Austrian retreat Leopold now proceeded to commit a series of blunders which further weakened his position. His handling of the ministerial and Parliamentary delegations was not smart. He set up a court, with observance of forms and precedence required, and then disregarded them, with the result that there were hurt feelings. His treatment of his brother, the Regent, is said to have been very chilly. One well-known Minister emerged from the audience chamber and, in response to a question as to the reality of the King’s illness, shrugged his shoulders and said, loud enough to be heard by a good many people, “I know only that he is a perpetual fascist.”
It was certainly also a blunder not to dismiss the unpopular members of his household back in Brussels until it. was too late to do his cause any good. Then he chose as his closest personal adviser Jacques Pirenne, the son of a celebrated Belgian historian. M. Pirenne was, naturally, an ardent supporter of Leopold, and perhaps it is hardly to be expected that someone from the opposite camp would have been chosen.
It must he borne in mind that the purpose of this adviser was to inform the King of the true state of opinion in Belgium. It therefore annoyed the Belgians a good deal that M. Pirenne had spent the occupation and liberation years in Switzerland and could scarcely be expected to know much of internal Belgian affairs and the state of mind of a population which had endured four years of German occupation and nearly nine months of liberation, with all its emotional and physical ups and downs, plus a drastic reinvasion of the native soil. M. Pirenne was not a happy choice for this post.
4
TOWARDS the end of June the notion that the King’s health prevented his return to Belgium was abandoned and he had an interview with the heads of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, from which emerged a message to the people. The Catholics had all along maintained two points which carried some weight with the people. One was that it was unfair to debate in Parliament the question of the King and hence pass judgment on him when he was not allowed to be present to defend himself. The second was that the United States Army had kept the King virtually a prisoner and had in fact issued instructions to prevent him from re-entering Belgium should he make the attempt.
The Belgian government categorically denied that the King was a prisoner, and SHAEF hastened to reassure everyone that facilities would be granted to pass the King up to, but no further than, the Belgian frontier. SHAEF considered this a Belgian problem in which the Allies had no right to interfere. And in fairness it must be said that all the BrusselsSalzburg trips were accomplished with Allied military aid.
There was undoubtedly more point to the first of the Catholic charges, so that the King’s message was awaited with considerable eagerness. When it came, it proved to be a damp squib. Critical comment on the message pointed out the hollowness of its sentiments. By implication the Van Acker government was attacked. Parliament was thanked in flattering terms, though Leopold had not concealed his prejudice against it on the occasion of his first interview with the Ministers and had left its congratulatory message of May 8 unanswered. There were greetings to the Resistance, to which Leopold III had never deigned to give the least encouragement during the occupation. There were compliments to the Allies, whom he recognized as such for the first time since the capitulation. And there were reassuring allusions to the Constitution and to democracy.
In brief, Leopold made a bid to let bygones be bygones. His failure in the subsequent weeks to persuade anyone to form a government with him on the throne, to replace the Van Acker Cabinet and the Regency, is probably evidence that the Belgian people were not then ready to bury the past.
M. Van Acker had his way and the royal question was debated in Parliament. The debate as such was interesting for the feebleness and occasional peevishness of the royal protagonists’ arguments. The opening by M. Van Acker was remarkable for its restraint and its deadly scoring of points against Leopold. His success was the more to his credit because his Flemish-accented French is the source of considerable mirth in political circles in Brussels.
Probably the best speech was made by the Minister of Foreign Affairs (now President of the United Nations), M. Paul-Henri Spaak, who is the ablest orator in Belgium today. One of his more telling points referred to the King’s advisers. Characterizing them as a “terrible mistake,”M. Spaak went on: “The regime of the counselors cannot occur again. The only advisers of the King must be his Ministers. The King has not had good luck with his advisers. They accepted no responsibility. There were often some among them whose names were not known. Above all there is now with the King a secret and intimate counselor who exercises on him an influence regrettable for the State.” (This was M. Pirenne, but a listener might have thought it could be Mlle. Baels.)
There is yet one more factor which militated against Leopold’s reinstatement at that time. By May, 1945, Belgium, unlike France, was clearly on the upswing. Her food situation was greatly improved. Her industry was beginning to hum. While far from normal, her general economic health wars being more rapidly restored than that of her liberated neighbors. The last thing the country wanted was a red-hot political row, which the return of Leopold III would have precipitated. At first the royal problem aroused keen interest, but as the comic opera proceedings unfolded, the people grew thoroughly fed up with it. Feelings were not helped by gangs of boy scouts and children, egged on by Roman Catholic priests, disturbing every public gathering with shrill cries of “Leopold!”
The Regent finally no longer appeared in public, so tiresome did these demonstrations become. The people wanted nothing more than to get back to the allimportant work of reconstruction, and all these political disturbances were not good for business. After all, the national dignity became involved. The Belgians did not enjoy the sensation that their country was again in an unfavorable limelight, talking politics when there was much more vital work to be done.
The elections of February 17 of this year were something of a surprise to those of us who thought last summer that Belgium would go to the left. The Catholics, largely through the solidity of their power in the Flemish provinces and the fear of Communism which German propaganda has so successfully implanted in parts of Europe, won back more than the seats which they had in 1939 in the Chamber and nearly as many in the Senate. Of course, the two fascist parties, Rex and VNV, were not represented, inasmuch as collaborators and their families were not allowed to vote.
But even so, the Catholics by themselves have not a majority in Parliament. They are the largest represented party, but could be outvoted by a coalition of the other parties. The issue of King Leopold would very probably bring about such a united front. If he continues obstinate and raises the issue of the monarchy, rather than his personal reign, by continuing to refuse to abdicate and by not yielding up his son, Baudouin, to succeed to the throne under the Regency, there is no telling what might happen. Parliament would then have to make a much more difficult choice.
It was Belgium’s misfortune at the start of this war not to have great leaders. In 1914 she had King Albert, Cardinal Mercier, and the famous Burgomaster of Brussels, Adolphe Max. In 1940 she had Leopold III and Cardinal Van Roey. Whatever the altered circumstances, the fact is that Leopold took precisely the opposite course from his father’s. Cardinal Van Roey won unpopularity among patriotic Belgians and the approval of the Germans by publicly protesting against Allied bombings before D Day. The retort of the people to this ecclesiastical protest was to say that “you cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
The Cardinal’s remarks may well be forgotten, and the response to his party at the polls probably indicates that they have been. But Leopold III is still persisting in the position of asking the country to accept a tainted and discredited leadership. Strangers will marvel if the answer does not continue to be “No.” If at any time it should be “Yes,” the causes will have to be sought elsewhere than in the personality and recent history of this monarch.